Desiring to get the most out of life, life's lovers intend
to earn and therefore deserve the best the world has to offer.
Materialism is an anti-concept which damns this desire as
a spiritually bankrupt, destructive pursuit. In the most rudimentary
separation, it considers the body and mind to be two halves
of a man with no interconnection, and more often than not,
declares them to be fiercely at
odds-the modern equivalent of religion's "man fighting
for his soul." They claim they can put him back on track,
exclaiming that spirituality can only be achieved by renouncing
all material interests and necessities. The anti-concept is
further narrowed as no intellectual pursuit is considered
spiritual, omitting whatever could offend the non-thinking,
non-producing man. In true Fear-drivenfashion, they look down
on the physical world where they have no power, and look up
to the spiritual where they have no responsibility.
In their world, spiritual pursuits must yield no hard-earned
clarity or material advantages, just some empty, unquestionable,
eternal bliss. Has anyone ever asked why? Why is that spiritual;
because it's the Hindu's answer? Centuries of monks have passed
through time, sitting Indian-style in silence with steepled
hands and have brought to the world a value amounting to exactly.nothing.
Their credo is mindlessness as the price of spirituality and
stagnation as the price of peace-not a healthy pattern to
follow. Why renounce the material world? "Man's greed"
would be their response, and the only way around wanting something
improperly-as the Fear-driven see no alternative-is to want
nothing, the only way for them not to harm is not to move.
But greed or any desire, great or small, is only wrong when
one seeks the unearned. Greed as defined by Webster's dictionary,
is "an excessive desire for getting or having; a desire
for more than one needs or deserves." It has a very negative
connotation, yet can simply mean as stated under greedy, "intensely
eager." It's a word twisted to draw a moral conclusion
in advance; to assert that a strong desire is wrong in itself
regardless of whether its means of fulfillment is honest or
dishonest.
Are people that "never have enough" truly evil?
Beginning with the obvious, a human being is an entity of
matter and consciousness, requiring material and spiritual
products to sustain itself. Should we damn our bodies because
they are never done consuming food? Every day, on and on,
nourish, expel, nourish, expel-the simple nature of the entity.
Did it ever occur to you that Man's spirit runs the same cycle?
Spirit Murderers often deny this nutritional cycle, reaching
a point where they decide they are done learning-what I call
the Finished Product. They stifle the expansion of their knowledge,
yet expect to continue to gain spiritual values, never seeing
its link to their unhappiness. Man can no more settle for
a fixed amount of achievement, than he can exist with a single
breath of oxygen. Happy people do not seek or settle for an
intellectually or physically static state of being, at any
age. There is no such thing as a mindless body or a bodiless
mind, and a man cannot live lacking either. To survive, he
must continue to feed both. You may hear about their wonderful
out of body experiences, but what do you think their body
was doing while they were off floating in no-man's land? Keeping
them alive is all.
They dispense with our ambition, saying "There are non-material
ideals to consider." That's true. The non-material ideals
are the abstract ideals of a Self-made Man, which make grasping
and seeking the material ideals possible. With our own neurobiological
understanding, it is becoming clear that there is no real
separation between mind and body at all. All living organisms
have specific nutrients they must pursue in both realms. But
how is this done? Proper spiritual nutrition is found exactly
in the creative activity of bringing abstract ideas into material
reality, which they damn, not first in buying the goods, but
in producing them. It's exciting to come up with an idea and
see if the world will go for it. Win or lose, I keep running
this process over and over-I love it! I love the opportunity
to buy the products of another's genius-simple inventions
like my tool-grabber, things I've imagined but haven't the
time to develop, and revolutionary new ideas from people who've
spent passionate time out on an epistemological limb I'll
never have to walk alone. The passionate endeavors of others
have brought such wealth into my life, that in my thankfulness,
I don't know where to begin. Maybe from the harnessing of
fire, to the invention of the wheel, to Aristotle's laws of
logic, to the founding fathers of America, to Benjamin Franklin's
experiments with electricity, to Thomas Edison's light bulb,
to Henry Ford's Model T, to IBM's personal computer and its
unlimited applications, to the exotic cars I treasure-these
are all products of Man which I benefit from greatly, and
had no part in designing. All were considered foolish ostentation
or evil upon their inception, in malicious fear of the creative
faculty from which they came, by those whose productive significance
history never seems to record.
Very few people are wrapped up in "over-consumerism"
-shopping themselves silly as a manic attempt to replace spiritual
fulfillment. Such an addiction is an aversive dependency just
as alcoholism or gambling, but in these others, the remedial
push is to get their act together. There is rarely a call
to separate oneself from oneself, and reformers focus on those
afflicted; they don't declare it to be a worldwide epidemic.
Their solution for this supposed rash of greed is only to
relegate our time to idle prayer or to a cruder material pursuit
they can understand, such as farming. Only in socialist slave-pens
such as China, does a society need to focus solely on the
preservation of Man's body, a need their political system
consistently fails to meet. Freedom translates into innovations
for efficient farming requiring less labor, releasing individuals
to create new products and new markets. Those who want to
stop men from producing whatever
comes to their mind as a salable product, then dictate to
them how they will spend their time, their money and on what,
are the ones to be criticized. America's wonderful bounty
of products is the result of every man's right to exist being
recognized, and that's all. Breathe easily when a man is after
money and luxuries he is willing to earn, because when he
isn't, he is after control. The Spirit
Murderers are the ones responsible for wanting the unearned
in both realms; the problem was created by them, in self-restraint
supposedly solved by them, and the Finished Product was its
result. This cold, mindless, dead relation to matter and spirit
has nothing to do with us, so we should leave them to it.
Self-made Man can and does act without harming. He can want
properly. Most forget that those accused of being materialist,
often put many unpaid years into their fields before any profit
is realized, if at all. And profit, damned for centuries,
is the basic necessity of life, the requirement that one stays
ahead of even-in body and spirit. It is the third step of
cognition, the act of creation-the hope of prosperity in any
realm in which one dares to dream-that brings the human spirit
to life. It is the fourth step of cognition-validation, whose
equivalent in work is profit, which determines whether one
remains on course. Whether one's interest is commercial, romantic
or both, profiting is not evil or wasteful as the Spirit Murderers
claim, but essential: the very fiber of our self-esteem, and
the key to the deepest spirituality a man can ever hope to
reach-and they know it.
To know that one's divine inspiration has a productive purpose-that
it brings joy to others and prosperity to ourselves, that
our energy serves a sum, not to be lost in
the past, but a value to be brought forward with every day
of our lives-develops an inertia that will supercharge our
exhilaration for living. This moral awareness is the whole
point of Moral Armor. As a result, all thought and action
becomes tied to prosperity, as it should be. The structure
of every mind assumes the correct hierarchical order and gains
the capacity to project across the span of its own
existence, bringing to fruition a height of personal significance,
almost too precious to contemplate.
Ronald E. Springer is the Author/Philosopher of Moral
Armor, the world's first fully-integrated moral philosophy
based on the nature of Man. Featured on The Mitch Albom Show,
NBC and FOX News radio affiliates, Mr. Springer is available
for interviews, speaking engagements, philosophy workshops
and seminars. Please contact [email protected]
or visit http://www.MoralArmor.com
for details.
